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THE 

DESTINY OF THE SOUL 

OF A SOLDIER 



HOW GOD LOOKS UPON THE 
PRESENT CONFLICT 

THE REV. REGINALD Jy CAMPBELL 

Great Britain's Most Popular Preacher 



THE DEAD WAR HEROES LIVE 
WITH US 

MAURICE MAETERLINCK 

"The Belgian Shakespeare" 



A TRIBUTE TO THE SOUL OF 
THE SAILOR 

BY GOVERNOR CHARLES H. BROUGH 
OF ARKANSAS 



INTRODUCTION, CONCLUSION 
AND COLLATION 

THE REV. JOHN L. SAUNDERS 
LITTLE ROCK, ARK. 



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©CI.A481204 
DEC 31 1917 



/ilt^-^ { 



I am a Revolutionist in the realm of thought. 

I thank God that I owe my fealty to the grand republic 
of intellectual liberty, where every citizen, however 
humble, has a right to be free, crowned and sceptered. 

I believe we may safely follow the guidance of an 
awakening conscience, for beneath her banner the daunt- 
less champions of human liberty have gained their inspira- 
tion to nerve the eagle's wing for its majestic flight — to 
fling Freedom's ensign like a burst of gold and glory into a 
leaden sky. 

"New occasions new duties teach. 
Time makes ancient good uncouth; 
They must upward still and onward 
Who would keep abreast of Truth." 

It is only Falsehood that seeks to entrench itself 
behind the dust of centuries, and cries aloud, "Don't 
disturb me, for I was accepted by saints and statesmen, 
and I am unassailable." 

Then turn your battering rams of logic upon the false 
and untrue, supporting Truth as it stands unfaltering and 
unashamed in the bright glare of the noon-day sun, the 
very essence of the religion of the immaculate Son of God. 

Let us therefore bring forth from the storehouses of 
intellect some of the brilliant jewels of genius, like rare 
diamonds from the secret chambers of earth. 

It is with great pleasure that I introduce the Rev. 
Reginald J. Campbell, England's foremost thinker and 
theologian, who has spoken as by inspiration for the 
English-speaking race upon the subject, "How God Looks 
Upon the Present Conflict." 



British Pastor Would Not End War If 
He Were God 



By the Rev. R. J. Campbell 

The Most Popular Preacher in England 



Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod; 
Have mercy on my soul, Lord God, 
As I would do if I were God, 
And Thou wert Martin Elginbrod. 

This striking epitaph, quoted by George Macdonald, 
is said, though I cannot be sure, to have been placed on the 
tombstone of some individual of Norse extraction buried 
in the North of Scotland. The Norse element in certain 
parts of Scotland has contributed not a little to the char- 
acteristic sturdiness and independence of her people and 
to the great part they have played in the world in modern 
times. 

I hope it is true that this inscription does appear, or 
once did appear, in a Scottish graveyard. I may not have 
got it verbally exact, and have no means of verifying it, 
but it is near enough. To my mind there is something 
rather fine about it without a trace of irreverence or pre- 
sumption. 

Something similar is recorded as having been uttered 
in France in the Fifteenth century or thereabouts by a 
famous captain of freebooters, named La Hire, though not 
with the simple dignity of the verse given above. 

Men Who Have Put Themselves in Place of God. 

According to Hallam, this worthy was not addicted 
to spending much time over his devotions, and was found , 
fault with thereupon. He held, however, that his mode of 
praying was as effective as anyone else's. Before going 
into battle he would address Heaven thus: "So do with 



me this day, God, as I would do with Thee if I were God 
and Thou wert La Hire." 

This bold, even audacious, anthropomorphism, this 
drawing of a likeness between man and God, makes one 
great assumption, namely, that divine goodness is at least 
equal to human and not different in kind. The crudity of 
the sentiment in other ways need not blind us to the value 
of this. That it puts man and God over against each 
other, as it were, as distinct entities, regarding God as a 
kind of larger man, but stronger, abler and in possession of 
fuller information, holding a supreme magisterial office to 
which we are amenable, need not disturb us. 

Perhaps no religious proposition that has ever been 
framed has altogether escaped this inherent anthropo- 
morphism, or could do so. Do what we will, when we think 
of God, or, rather, when we think of the character of God 
(if I may be permitted the use of that not very satisfactory 
expression), we are more or less compelled to compare 
Him with man. 

We do it as a matter of course, even when we are not 
conscious of it. And we have high authority for doing it; 
in fact, the highest authority that has ever found expression 
through human lips, that of Christ himself. 

When he said, "If ye then, being evil, know how to 
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall 
your father which is in Heaven give good things to them 
that ask him?" He was saying much the same thing as La 
Hire and Martin Elginbrod after all. He v/as bidding us 
to estimate the goodness of God by the best we have 
learned to know of the goodness of man. 

And yet we ought to be careful in our employment of 
this comparison. Obviously we cannot press it so far as to 
make it explain all the ways of God in his dealings with his 
creatures. God is not a larger man, viewing life from 
man's restricted standpoint and subject to the same limita- 
tions of feeling and action. 

He is the life of all that is, the infinitely complex 
reality that is finding manifestation in the world of worlds, 



present in every grain of dust as in the farthest star. 
¥/ithout him nothing exists. In him is all that is or ever 
shall be. 

To quote the words of one of the greatest of the world's 
spiritual seers, words that everybody knows without 
stopping to ponder them, "in him we live, move and have 
our being." How can w^e, then, enclose him in human 
categories v/hen we want to discuss his attributes? At 
least we must keep our thoughts clear while we attempt it. 

Of no man can it be said that others live, move and 
have their being in him. No man indwells in any other 
being than his own, except in a very limited and special 
sense. No man is the creator and sustainer of any universe, 
however small. 

No man ever creates anything; he only discovers. 
He works with nature, and nature reveals her secrets to 
him. It is impossible for the human mind to imagine 
anything that does not already exist in some form. Picture 
as grotesque an animal as you please, you will still have to 
give it limbs, mouth, teeth and eyes, or some of 
them. You may multiply the quantity, but you cannot 
invent an organ for it the like of which has never been seen 
or heard of before. 

The telephone and the wireless telegraph v/ere hidden 
in earth and air when Abraham marched to the rescue of 
Lot across the plains of Mesopotamia millenniums ago. 
But he did not know it and so could not advise his kinsman 
of his coming in the way a British force on the same spot is 
doing today. 

Moses crossing the Red sea used no aeroplanes to 
reconnoiter Pharaoh's host, nor had he ever heard of the 
submarine, but thej^ were there all right if he had only 
known how to summon them forth. 

Trying to See God in a True Light. 

No, man is not as God in relation to existence as a 
whole or in part. We have to reason from the known to 
the unknown. God does not. Our reason works within 



certain definite, sharply defined conditions. It cannot be 
supposed that God's does. 

As Henri Bergson tells us, the human mind is a by no 
means perfect instrument for enabling us to find our way 
about and do the best we can in a three-dimensional world, 
a world of up and down and to and fro, a world of material 
objects, of weights and gravitation, and dinners and teas, 
and clothes and houses, and cold and hot, and wet and 
dry, and all such like. 

Suppose a world of 50 dimensions — as there very well 
may be — or a world where none of these conditions held 
good at all, what then? Still it would be God's world, and 
His knowledge and power would pervade and control it as 
now. Clearly when we talk of any likeness between man 
and God we must make large allov/ances. 

Let me point out that I am taking nothing for granted 
so far. I am not on my own ipse dixit dogmatically de- 
claring that there is a God. I only say that if there be — 
and it is really undeniable in the last resort — He cannot 
be conditioned as we are, and therefore His ways of be- 
having must be to a large extent incomprehensible to us. 
Even the terms "He," "His," "Him," as applied to deity, 
are apt to become somewhat misleading. They at once 
call up the idea of a person of the male sex, like ourselves, 
but greater, wiser, better perhaps. Let us get that out of 
our heads. God is neither male nor female, and none of the 
other human qualities that depend upon earthly relation- 
ships can be exactly predicated of Him. 

If I had a better pronoun wherewith to designate the 
divine being I would use it, but it is part of our limitations 
that we have none. We cannot call Him "it," for that 
suggests something less than human, not something more. 
And God must be more, infinitely more, than the greatest 
we have yet known as man, for surely v/e have nothing 
that has not come from Him. How could we have? 

I think I could get on common ground with the most 
pronounced agnostic as well as the most assiduous church- 
goer by insisting on what I have said already — God is that, 
whatever it is, and it is far beyond the power of our intelli- 

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gence and imagination to grasp whence all that is pro- 
ceeds directly or indirectly, except where our own wills 
come into play. 

He is the eternal force that brings into existence and 
maintains the universe and everything in it. Hence He 
must be the source of everything in ourselves which we are 
accustom.ed to look upon as admirable — good, beautiful, 
sublime. Can one get away from that? I do not see how. 
In so far, then, as we find anything fine and worthy of 
reverence in human nature, we are justified in affirming 
that that same thing is in God. 

These considerations are suggested to me by remarks 
that have reached me concerning what I have previously 
written in these columns. They have not all reached me 
by post. Som.e of them, and these not the least piquant, 
have been addressed to me orally by our soldiers who have 
been reading my articles. But all the interrogations put 
together only amount to this — If God is good as man is 
good, or as man thinks of good, why does He permit evils 
to fall upon us from which we should do our best to shield 
our children? If I were God would I do it? 

How Would God Look Upon the Present 
Conflict.^ 

"There cannot be a God," cried a French essayist, 
"for if there were, the woes of humanity would break His 
heart." Are you sure of that? What if God knows as we 
cannot know, that the woes of humanity are but as the 
troubles of childhood? The troubles of childhood are real 
enough to children, but what do their elders think of 
them? It is all a matter of perspective. 

I can remember, as I dare say everybody can, that 
the griefs and fears of my childhood's days were as intense 
and poignant in their way as anything I have endured 
since. But they would not seem very serious to me now. 
They did not seem very serious to my preceptors then, 
though no doubt I had their kindly sympathy in bearing 
them. They knew, as I could not know, that it was not 



so very important to save me from them, but highly im- 
portant that I should come through them rightly. 

My playmates would have saved me from them per- 
haps, or those who cared most for me would. But as a 
rule they could not. They took my point of view and 
mourned their impotence. To them it really did matter a 
great deal that I had lost my biggest glass alley, or seen 
my favorite puppy drown, or been forbidden to go to the 
school treat, or been bowled for a duck in the cricket 
match. They knew all about the quarrelings and makings 
up again which constituted school politics, the smart of 
injustice at the hands of ruthless grown-ups, the humilia- 
tion and dismay of being plucked in exams, or given 
the cold shoulder by those whose favor one most ardently 
desired to win. 

That was because they took my point of view. No 
adult either could or would, or if, through sheer kindliness 
of heart, one here and there pretended to, they did it in 
such a way as to show me that they did not regard it in the 
same tragic light as I did. 

Is not this the clue to the matter that puzzles so many 
people just now? Would we treat our children thus? 
We cry when tragedy, dark and dreadful, invades our little 
world. No, we should not any more than one child would 
ordinarily condemn another to the experiences that to the 
childish mind are irksome and grievous. 

If I were God would I allow mankind either to inflict 
or endure anguish as it is doing today on such a colossal 
scale? If I were God would there be all this cruel welter of 
blood and tears? With the immortal Omar we protest: 

Ah, Love, could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire; 
Would we not shatter it to bits and then 
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire? 

If I were God would human folly and wickedness be 
permitted to fill the earth with horror and flame, to breed 
misery and injustice, to crush and trample upon the weak 



and innocent? Yes, if you were God. That is just the 
point: You are not God. If you were you would view the 
struggle and the pain "with larger other eyes," as Tennyson 
affirms, than even the angels do or our sainted dead. You 
are not God, nor are you yet of the great cloud from the 
side of Heaven. You are only a child at school, and with 
the eyes of a child you gaze upon this death in life, behold- 
ing not what lies beyond, and perceiving little of the reason 
why things are as they are in the somber arena where 
Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless thousands mourn. 
Let no one ask this question any more; it is a childish 
question, though it springs from a good impulse. All 
that is good in us is of God. It must be. Where else 
could it come from? You cannot get more out of the uni- 
verse than is already in it somewhere. Is the stream of 
human tenderness likely to be purer than its fountain? 
That is the way some people talk, but it is pathetically 
silly. The very heart with which you protest against the 
ills of life is the product of the source of life. To the riddle 
of existence 

I have no answer for myself or thee 
Save that I learned beside my mother's knee; 
All is of God that is and is to be. 
And God is good. Let this suffice us still, 
Resting in childlike trust upon His will 
Who moves to His great ends unthwarted by the ill. 
There is comfort in this, and inspiration, too. But, 
someone will object, if the good is of God so is the bad. 
We have no more right to say He is good because there is 
goodness in the world than that He is bad because there is 
badness in the world. No? Is that the way you reckon 
with your friends? 

You do not expect the same man to be true and a liar, 
tender and brutal, faithful and treacherous. If your best 
friend is accused of dishonorable conduct, no matter how 
black the evidence may be, you refuse to credit it. You 
say: "I know him to be of strict integrity. Therefore I 
wait in confidence for the matter to be cleared up." . 



The Soldier's Chance of Getting to Heaven. 

Quite right. God cannot be the gentle heroism of 
Edith C a veil and the vile deviltry of von Bissing. That 
the one derives from Him renders it impossible that He 
could be the other. He could not be both Christ and 
Pilate. 

The other night a soldier thus addressed me publicly: 
"Sir, somebody has been saying in England that a man 
who dies for his country goes straight to Heaven whatever 
his life may have been beforehand. Do you think it is 
true that if a chap has been a bit rackety, and yet gives his 
life in this way, he will be all right on the other side, or will 
he have to go to hell?" 

Do not smile, reader, at the naive simplicity of the 
question. I thought I detected a certain wistfulness 
behind it, and it had evidently been widely discussed 
among the men who heard it put. 

I replied: "Probably the issue is not quite so sharp as 
you make it. Few of us are fit either for highest Heaven 
or deepest hell. But what would you do if you were God?" 

"I think I should give a fellow a chance," was the 
instant response. 

Need more be said? 



Maeterlinck Says the Dead War Heroes 
Live With Us 



By Maurice Maeterlinck 

"The Belgian Shakespeare." 

In a little book which is really a strange masterpiece, 
"The Enchanted City," the English novelist, Mrs. Oli- 
phant, describes how the dead of a provincial town sud- 
denly become indignant at the conduct and the morals of 
those who inhabit the city which they founded, rise in 
rebellion, invade the houses, the streets and the public 
places, and under the pressure of their innumerable multi- 
tude all powerful, although invisible, push back the living, 
thrust them out of doors and, mounting guard, do not allow 
them to return within their walls until a treaty of peace and 
penitence has purified their hearts, repaired the scandals 
they have caused and assured better conduct in the future. 

There is no doubt symbolized in this fiction, carried 
too far intentionally because we only appreciate material 
and ephemeral realities, a great truth. The dead live and 
move among us much more actively and efficaciously than 
the boldest imagination could depict. It is very doubtful 
whether they ever remained in their tombs. It appears 
even more and more certain that they never permitted 
themselves to be shut up there. There is under the tomb- 
stones where we think them prisoners only a little dust 
which no longer belongs to them, which they have aban- 
doned without regret and of which probably they scorn to 
preserve any memory. All that was really themselves 
remains with us. Under what form or in what manner, 
we do not yet know, after so many thousands, perhaps 
millions of years, and no religion has been able to tell us 
with a satisfying certainty, although all have striven to 
do so; but we may still, from certain indications, hope to 
learn the secret. 

Without considering farther a mighty but obscure 
truth which it is impossible at this moment to state pre- 
cisely or to make intelligible, we will confine ourselves to 

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that which is not contestable. As I have said before, what- 
ever may be our religious faith, there is in every case a place 
where our dead cannot perish, where they continue to exist 
as really and sometimes more actively than when they were 
in the flesh; it is in ourselves that this living dwelhng place 
is found, this consecrated abode which for those whom we 
have lost becomes Paradise or Hell, in the measure that 
we approach or depart from their thoughts and their desires. 
Their thoughts and their desires are always higher 
than our own. It is, therefore, by raising ourselves that 
we shall approach nearer to them. We must make the 
first step; they cannot descend, while it is always possible 
for us to rise; for the dead, whatever they may have been in 
life, become better than the best among us. The least 
good among them on losing their bodies, cast off its vices, 
its pettinesses, and its weaknesses, which our memory of 
them soon abandons also; and the spirit alone remains 
which is pure in every man and can desire only the good. 
There are no bad dead men because there are no bad souls. 
That is why, in the measure that we purify ourselves, we 
give life again to those who are no more and transform into 
a Heaven our memory which they inhabit. 

That which was always true of all the dead is today 
much more so because the best alone are chosen for the 
tomb. In the region that we think subterranean, which 
we call the kingdom of the shadows and which is in reality 
an ethereal region and the kingdom of light, there are at 
this moment disturbances as profound as those which we 
experience on the surface of our earth. The young dead 
invade that region from every side; and since the beginning 
of the world they were never so numerous, so full of 
strength and ardor. 

Whereas in the ordinary course of years, the habitation 
of those who leave us receives only tired and exhausted 
existences, there is not a single one of that kind in that in- 
comparable host of heroes which in the words of Pericles 
"leaves life at the height of glory." They have not gone 
down but risen to death, glorified by the greatest sacrifice 
that man can make for an idea which cannot die. Every- 

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thing we have believed up to this daj^ everything that we 
have sought to attain above ourselves, everything which 
has raised us to the point where we are, everything which 
has surmounted the evil days and the bad instincts of 
human nature, would be merely illusions and lies, if such 
heroes, such a vast amount of merit and glory, were to be 
really annihilated, to disappear forever, to become forever 
useless and inarticulate, forever without action upon a 
world to which they have given their lives. 

It is hardly possible that this can be true from the 
point of view of the external survival of the dead; but it is 
absolutely certain that it cannot be true with regard to their 
survival in ourselves. Here nothing is lost and nothing 
perishes. Our memories are today peopled with the multi- 
tude of heroes struck down in the flower of their age, quite 
different from the pale cohort of other days almost entirely 
composed of sick and old persons who had almost ceased 
to exist before leaving the earth. We must say to ourselves 
that now in every one of our houses, in our cities as in our 
fields, in the palace and in the humblest cottage lives and 
reigns a young dead soul in the full brilliance of his strength. 
He fills the humblest, darkest dwellings with a glory of 
which it would never have dared to dream. His presence 
constant, imperious and inevitable expands itself there and 
maintains a religion and thoughts which were not known 
before, consecrates everything around it, forces the eyes to 
look higher and the spirit not to descend again, purifies the 
air one breathes, the conversations that are held and the 
ideas that are expressed; and through communication 
from neighbor to neighbor, ennobles and elevates the 
whole people, as never before on so vast a scale. 

The dead of this type have a power as deep and fertile 
as life, and less precarious. It is terrible that this experi- 
ence should have taken place, for it is the most pitiless 
and the first on such an enormous scale that humanity 
has ever endured; but at this moment the trial has almost 
passed and we shall soon gather the most unexpected 
benefits. It will not be long before we shall see differences 
developing between the nations which have received all 

14 



these dead heroes and all this glory and those which were 
deprived of them, and we shall observe with astonishment 
that those who have lost the most are those which have 
kept their wealth and their men. 

There are losses which are inestimable gains and gains 
in which the future is lost. There are dead men whom the 
living could not replace and whose thoughts perform works 
that living bodies cannot accomplish. There are dead men 
whose force survives death and finds life again; and we are 
almost all of us at this hour heirs of a being greater, nobler, 
wiser, and more living than ourselves. With all those who 
accompany him he will be our judge, if it is true that the 
dead weigh the souls of the living and that upon their 
judgment depends our happiness. He will be our guide 
and our protector; for it is the first time since history has 
revealed to us its misfortunes that man feels hovering above 
his head and speaking in his heart such a multitude of 
glorious dead. 

"When we see the frightful loss of so many young lives, 
when we see so much physical and moral strength, so much 
intelligence and such magnificent promise pitilessly beaten 
down in their first flight, we are at the point of despair. 
Never have such splendid energies, such great hopes been 
flung down in an indiscriminate m.ass, without cessation, 
in one catastrophe after another, to a void from which no 
answer rises to us. Never has humanity, since it existed, 
seen such a squandering of its treasures, of its substance 
and of its future. 

For more than three years on all the fields of battle, 
where the bravest, the sincerest, the most ardent and the 
most devoted are necessarily the first to die and where the 
least courageous, the least generous, the weak, the sick, 
the least desirable, in short, have alone some chance of 
escaping the carnage, a sort of monstrous inverted selection 
is taking place which seems to be methodically pursuing 
the ruin of our race. We ask ourselves with anxiety what 
will be the state of the earth after the great trial, what will 
remain and what will become of a humanity decapitated 
and diminished by much that was highest and best? 

15 



It is certain that the question is one of the gloomiest 
that has ever presented itself to the anxiety of mankind. 
There is in it a material truth before which we are disarmed; 
and if we accept it as it presents itself, we can discover no 
remedy for the evil which threatens us. But material and 
tangible truths are never more than projecting angles of 
greater and deeply buried truths. The human race ap- 
pears to be a force of nature so necessary and so indestruct- 
ible, that it has always up to now not only surmounted the 
most desperate trials, but it has always been able to draw 
benefits from them and to emerge greater and stronger 
than it was before. 

It is understood that peace is preferable to war; they 
are two terms which it is insane to compare to one another. 
It is understood that if this cataclysm, unchained by a 
madness without name, had not fallen upon the world, 
humanity would without doubt have attained before long a 
culminating point of which it is impossible to foresee the 
surprises and revelations. It is understood that if one- 
third or one-quarter of the fabulous sums expended to 
exterminate and destroy had been consecrated to works of 
peace, all the injustices which poison the atmosphere we 
breathe could have been magnificently rectified, and that 
the social question, which is the great life and death 
question that justice presents to the human race, would 
have been once for all and definitely resolved into a happi- 
ness which our sons or our grandsons will perhaps not 
know. It is understood that the loss of many millions of 
young lives cut down at the moment when they were 
about to flourish, will leave in history an abyss which it will 
not be easy to fill, because it is certain that among these 
dead were minds of genius that will not return and which 
bore in them inventions and discoveries which we shall 
not find again perhaps for centuries. It is understood that 
we shall never know all the consequences of this thrusting 
back of progress and of these injuries without precedent. 

But all this being granted, it is well to keep possession 
of oneself. There is no irreparable loss. Everything is 
transformed, nothing perishes and what appears to be 

16 



thrown to annihilation is in no way annihilated. Our 
moral world, like our physical world, is an immense 
sphere, but hermetically closed, from which nothing can 
go out, from which nothing can fall to lose itself in space. 

Everything that exists, everything that is created on 
this earth remains there and bears its fruits; and the worst 
calamities are only spiritual and material blessings, burst- 
ing forth at one moment and then falling back in another 
form. There are no outlets from this sphere, no paths of 
flight, no gaps, no side paths, no losses and no oblivion. 
All this heroism expended on every side does not leave 
our globe; and if the courage of our soldiers seems so gen- 
eral and yet so extraordinary, it is because all the powers 
of the dead have passed into those that survive. All these 
forces of knowledge, of virtue, of patience, of honor and of 
sacrifice which grow from day .to day, and which we our- 
selves, who are far from danger, feel mounting in us without 
knowing whence they come, are nothing but souls of the 
heroes which our souls receive and absorb. 

It is well at times to consider invisible things as if we 
saw them. This is what the great religions ought to do. 
They represented under forms appropriate to the civili- 
zation they found the truths hidden, profound, instinctive, 
universal and essential, which guide humanity. All re- 
ligions have appreciated and recognized this highest thing 
among truths; the communion of the living and the dead. 
They have given it various names which evidence the same 
mysterious certainty: Intercession of the saints among 
Christians, transmigration or reincarnation of souls among 
the Buddhists, Shintoism or the cult of ancestors among the 
Japanese, who are more convinced than any other people 
that the dead do not cease to live, direct all our acts, are 
helped by our virtues and become gods. 

"One of the surprises of the future," says Lafcadio 
Hearn, the writer who has best studied and understood 
this remarkable cult of ancestors, "will be certainly the 
return to beliefs and ideas that have long been abandoned 
because we were persuaded that they contained no truths — 
beliefs which are still called barbarous, pagan and 

17 



mediaeval by those who condemn them from simple habit. 
From day to day the researches of science bring us new 
proofs that the savage, the barbarian, the idol worshipper 
and the mediaeval monk have arrived by different paths 
as near to certain points of eternal truth as any thinker of 
this century. We are learning also that theories of as- 
trologers and alchemists were only partially and not totally 
false. We have even reason to suppose that no dream of 
the invisible world, no hypothesis of the unseen was ever 
conceived, in which the science of the future will not find 
some germ of reality." 

We might add many things to these lines, especially 
everything that metaphysical science, the most recent of 
our sciences, is on the path of discovering concerning the 
miraculous faculties of our subconsciousness. To return 
more directly to what we were discussing, have we not 
already observed that after the great battles of the Na- 
poleonic era births increased in an extraordinary manner, as 
if the lives suddenly cut down in their flower were not really 
dead and were in haste to appear again among us in order 
to complete their career? If we could follow with our eyes 
what happens in the ideal world which dominates us on 
every side we should observe, doubtless, that the same 
law applies to the moral forces which appear to be lost on 
the fields of carnage. They know where to go, they know 
their goal and do not hesitate. What our dead heroes 
abandon they leave to us; and when they die for us, it is 
not metaphorically and in an indirect way, but in a very 
real sense and in a direct manner that they leave their 
lives to us. Every man who dies in a glorious action gives 
forth a virtue which falls back on us; and in the violence of 
an untimely ending, nothing goes astray and nothing 
evaporates. He gives in one great and single act what he 
would have given us in a long existence of duty and love. 

Death does not cut into life; it can do nothing against 
life. The total amount of life remains always the same. 
That which death takes from those who fall enters into 
those who remain standing. If the number of lamps dimin- 
ishes, the height of the flame rises. Death gains nothing as 

18 



long as any life exists. The more ravages it effects, the 
more it increases the intensity of the life it does not touch; 
the more it pursues its illusory victory, the better it proves 
to us that humanity will end by conquering it. 



19 



A Tribute to the Soul of the Sailor 



By Governor Charles H. Brough 

of Arkansas 



"O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, 
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free. 
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam. 
Survey our empire, and behold our home! 
These are our realms, no limit to their sway — 
Our flag the scepter, all who meet obey." 

Our sailor boys live a romantic and enchanted life^ 
our Navy has ever been the greatest defense and ornament 
of our country — the floating bulwark of "the land of the 
free and the home of the brave." Our sea tars, risking 
their lives on the briny deep, braving the perils of the 
lurking submarine, which is worse than "the devil carrying 
a dirk in the dark," loosening cables, clearing gangways, 
and oftentimes manning mighty guns, they are the ancient 
and natural strength of a free republic. Theirs is a mighty 
task — the protection of sea coast and Great Lake and Gulf 
lines, extending over eighteen thousand miles; the guard- 
ing of our home ports against attacks by hostile battleships 
equipped with guns having a range from twelve to fifteen 
miles; the safeguarding of the geographical isolation of a 
land that is "a precious gem, set in the silvery sea, against 
the envy of less happier lands." 

The brave sailors of the United States, England, 
France and Italy have, for the past three and a half years, 
been exposed to the greatest dangers recorded in naval 
warfare. Germany's infamous submarine campaign lit- 
erally reflects the policy of piracy proclaimed by Admiral 
Von Tirpitz, of the German navy, on February 5, 1914, 
the policy of "starving England and further striking 
terror into her civilian population by isolation of the 
country from the rest of the world," and the supplementary 
warning of the Imperial government of February 15, 

20 



i 



1914, that neutral nations should keep their ships out of 
the war zone. The torpedoing of "The Anguilla," with 
a loss of ten lives; of the "Fallowbar," with a loss of one 
hundred and seven; of the "Amaralganteaume," with a 
loss of forty; of the "Armenian," with a loss of thirty; of 
the "Hesperian," with a loss of thirty-two; of the "Ancona," 
with a loss of two hundred and eight; of the "Ville de Cio- 
tat," with a loss of eighty; of the "Persia," with a loss of 
three hundred and eighty-five; of the "Sussex," with a loss 
of fifty-two; of the Franco-Russian hospital ship "Portu- 
gal," with a loss of one hundred and fifteen non-com- 
batants; and greatest and most nefarious of all, the "Lusi- 
tania" on May 7, 1915, with a loss of 1198, many of whom 
were American women and children, are but a few of the 
atrocities practiced by the modern Hun and the modern 
"Scourge of God" on the high seas. These violations of 
all the rules of civilized maritime warfare reflect on the high 
seas the same inferno of revolting barbarity that led 
Manteuffel to sack beautiful Louvain, with its priceless 
library and time honored university; that animated Bulow 
and Shonmann to order the horrible massacre at Ardenne; 
that marked for destruction and made a target for the 
heaviest German guns the beautiful and richly ornamented 
Cloth Hall, begun by Count Baldwin the Ninth of Flanders 
in 1200 and completed in 1314, at Ypres; that instigated 
the ruthless execution of Miss Edith Cavell, the English 
nurse, who was the matron of the surgical institution in 
Brussels, by the treacherous and stone-hearted Von 
Bissing, that, too, despite her sex and the fact that she had 
spent a blameless life devoted to the alleviation of suffer- 
ing, and at the outset of the war had even nursed wounded 
German soldiers as well as those of other countries; that 
led to the criminal desertion by German authorities of 
the camps of prisoners of war at Wittenberg and Garde- 
kegen at a time when the unfortunate captives interned 
there were stricken with disease, itself aggravated, if not 
initiated, by callous disregard on the part of those in 
charge of the ordinary hygienic precautions which are 
essential in a crowded concentration camp; that permitted 

21 



the confiscation by the German government of about 20% 
of the remittances sent to British prisoners of war (com- 
batants and civilians) interned in Germany, and that 
sanctioned the execution of the brave Captain Fryatt of 
the steamship "Brussels" after he had been sentenced to 
death for having committed an act of self-defense well 
-recognized by the laws of war on sea. 

The torpedoing of the "Lusitania" on May 7, 1915, 
was a murder on so appalling a scale that, outside Germany, 
there was no nation of people which did not protest in 
horror of it. The "Lusitania" left New York on May 1st, 
after warnings had been issued by the German embassy 
that passengers would sail at their own peril. Her voyage 
was uneventful until she arrived ojff the south coast of 
Ireland, when vv^ithout warning she was torpedoed on her 
starboard side, and sank in twenty minutes, carrying into 
a watery grave 1198 unsuspecting men, women and 
children. The brave sea tars, many of them rough and 
uncouth, yet carrying in their bosoms hearts of humanity 
and a noble spirit of service, gave their lives freely that 
962 women and children might be rescued. I believe that 
to these brave sailor boys, because of their chivalrous 
devotion to duty and their lofty conceptions of unselfish 
service, will be vouchsafed an immortality that 
"O'er sweeps all times and all fears. 
And peals like the eternal thunders of the deep 
The words, 'Man, Thou wast not born to die.' " 
God grant that the American Navy, which with nearly 
750 vessels, including 50 battleships and an enlisted 
strength of 120,957 men, which is being rapidly recruited, 
a Navy on which a generous government has spent over 
three billions of dollars within the past year, may co-operate 
with Britannia's mJghty fleet and the splendid navies of 
France and Italy and other Allies, to preserve the freedom 
of the high seas, to rid the world forever of the menace of 
the submarine; to keep the ports of the world open in order 
that the people of our nation may bask in the sunshine of a 
healthful and normal commerce. God grant that the 
souls of our sailor boys may be kept in the hollow of His 

22 



Divine hand to preserve them as priceless legacies for 
future generations; and on the day when He shall make up 
his jewels may be remember our sailor boys, who have 
exemplified on the high seas the blessed assurance of His 
Divine Son that "Greater love hath no man than this, that 
he is willing to lay down his life for his friend." 

"My soul is an enchanted boat, 
Which like a sleeping swan doth float 

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing. 
And thine doth like an angel sit 
Beside the helm conducting it. 

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing." 



It was the privilege of the Hon. Elihu Root, while in 
Petrograd as Ambassador Extraordinary from the United 
States, to see the Legion of Death as it marched out from 
the capital of all the Russias to take its place on the battle- 
front. 

There marched in the Legion the daughters of former 
Siberian exiles who had borne the burdens, worn the 
chains, and been lashed by the knouts of Russian despotism 
during the martyrdom of centuries. 

Still ringing in their ears were the stories of their 
fathers' sufferings. 

The possibility, nay, the practical certainty, of a 
return to such an unbearable condition should the new 
republic break down haunted their young hearts and 
inspired them to revolt from the impending danger. 

If the men would not fight for their country and their 
priceless liberty, then must the women fight for them- 
selves. 

Fearlessly, with a Heaven-born courage, they tramped 
away to the battlefront, with a song of freedom on their 
lips. 

And many of them will never return. 

23 



But their comrades need not fear for them, for they 
know those intrepid heroines of the World War are not the 
victims of the insatiable licentiousness of the enemy. 

Each of them carried in her belt a stiletto with which 
she could free her soul to enjoy the peace and comfort 
denied her body, should she find herself in the hands of a 
relentless enemy who have unsheathed their swords even in 
the bosom of dimpled infancy. 

I believe the Arch Angel of Heaven dipped the tip of 
his silver wing into the golden chalice and wrote across 
the eternal records of the All- Wise: "To the honor, glory 
and chivalry of the Legion of Death." 

The Legion of Death may not be composed of military 
tacticians and adepts at warfare, but when the sheaves of a 
victorious peace shall have been gathered, theirs may 
prove to have been a vicarious sacrifice. 

To the world they have clearly proven that the heart 
of the woman patrician and plebeian alike responds to the 
call of patriotism and purity. 

To me the unerring finger of destiny, pointing through 
the eloquent pages of history and tradition, clearly indicates 
the successful conclusion of this tremendous conflict. 

For Liberty, Truth, and Democracy, crushed to earth 
by the bloody heel of an unleashed Prussian autocracy, 
must rise again in triumph to higher and nobler heights. 

Pharaoh had his Moses, Julius Caesar his Brutus, King 
Charles his Oliver Cromwell, George the Third his Wash- 
ington, Napoleon Bonaparte, the man of iron and destiny, 
who now sleeps in the land of romance and flowers in a 
tomb of gilt and gold, his Lord Wellington, the Czar of all 
the Russias his Kerensky, and Kaiser Wilhelm his Woodrow 
Wilson. 



Copyrighted, 1917 



LIBRPRY OF CONGRESS 



ni 



020 934 972 3 « 



